“Mummy,” the officer seems to say as he reaches up to her, “can I have some more?”

There is a hole where his mouth used to be. You think of the mouth as a hole, but a door is only a door until it’s ripped off its hinges, and then it’s a hole in the wall.

He doesn’t claw for her. He isn’t trying to snatch or to hurt—none of them are. They aren’t reaching to take, they’re reaching to be given. That’s how she knows they need her as a mother, not as a meal.

Not all of them raise their hands to her but perhaps that is only because not all of them have hands anymore. Or arms. Or even faces. And yet hundreds of them here in this tomb that was a tube station not twenty minutes ago, reach out for her, as a savior, as a mummy.

Until she tells them to stop.

Obedient, they turn away and she imagines them all as showing a sense of shame in the way they look off, like a young man honorable enough to realize his advances have been unwelcome, and to mercifully stop. But she knows better. She knows there is no emotion in any of these reanimated corpses. Their hearts no longer beat, the holes their heads no longer draw breath, their tearducts—those that have them still—have run dry. She is the only one here still feeling anything and the feelings she has, echoing through the chamber out the tunnels from longer ago than she cares to remember, are making her see things, are projecting onto these corpses like the toys of a child whose parents are fighting again.

Why is she doing this? What does she have to gain?

Soon they will come for her. They will find a way, and why shouldn’t they? She never wanted this to happen, either. She has wrought too much rot in this brave new world, so let the crows come to claim her. But now, in this one shining moment before she unravels, let her have this, let her feel this need from these creatures to whom she’s given life. Before they come for her and she loses this feeling again, let them reach for their mummy.

Dana Lord never thought of herself as a great beauty. No one, in fact, had ever thought of her as a great, or indeed any kind of, beauty. But she’d managed to find herself a man, through charm and luck, they told her, and she had to agree with them that it was luck even after her husband died in a car-crash while she was pregnant. She was devastated, of course, but still forced to talk about how lucky she had been to know him and for him to have loved her (even though he’d been no great beauty himself) because after all, no one as plain as she could just expect love to come to her like a great beauty could.

But when her child was born, it was apparent immediately that something was wrong. It wasn’t just the issue of the genitals. She’d been told her baby would be a boy, but when it came out, “A miracle!” the doctor exclaimed upon checking. “I’ve heard of cases like this—rumors, mostly—but to actually see one!”

Her child had been born with a penis and a vagina, both fully formed.

“And functioning!” the doctor insisted, though what he meant by that…

“But will he be able to have children?” Dana demanded. “Or… she?” Shocked, she settled on “It?”

“I believe ‘they’ is the preferred form, but perhaps you should wait and see how the child tends. I’ll need a name now,” said the attendant, “For the birth certificate.”

Dana was handed the baby and that was when she noticed what was really wrong. “Angel,” was the only name she could come up with. “My baby’s name is Angel.”

Perhaps if Dana had allowed the doctors to perform the simple procedure that would have pushed them one way or the other, things might have turned out different, but she kept arguing with herself—what if she got it wrong? And then looking into her child’s angelic face, she thought How could I mutilate this with a choice when they could have both?

But even if Dana Lord had made the choice for her Angel, would it have been any different? She or he would still have had that face. The most beautiful face imaginable.

Even as an infant, in the hospital, people were drawn to it, to the point of neglecting the other newborns. Attention was lavished on Angel Lord to such an extent that Dana breathed a sigh of relief that nothing bad could ever happen to them, they would want for nothing. They were too beautiful to suffer.

But by the time Angel was two, the price of beauty became apparent. Dana came home to find the uncle she’d left with them in the one position you never want a babysitter to be in.

“I just… I couldn’t help myself,” said Dana’s brother. The rest of what he said, how he tried to excuse himself, was unfit for any ears but those in prison who would punish him for it.

But it did show Dana what she needed to do to keep her child safe. She thought about mutilation, scarification, maybe make it look like an accident. The price of beauty was too high to pay, but how could she destroy the face of an Angel? So instead, she fashioned a Veil for her Angel and made them wear it wherever they went. At first, she tried to get dispensation from school, but no, no, no, it was much easier to teach them at home, keep them away from the eyes of the curious.

“But it’s uncomfortable!” Angel complained all the time as they got older.

“Oh, you think that’s uncomfortable!” Dana exclaimed. “Think what they’ll think of you without it—I promise you, that’ll make you uncomfortable!”

At fourteen, Angel Lord fell in love with a girl they met online. “Why do you wear that Veil?” the girl asked.

“Because I’m ugly,” replied the Angel. “So ugly that people will try to hurt me if they see my face.”

“I won’t try to hurt you!” the girl insisted. “I could never hurt you!”

So Angel sent a picture, sans Veil. “You’re beautiful!” the girl said, tears in her eyes.

She tried to come to them, and they tried to get away, but couldn’t outfox Dana. Time and again, the girl failed. So after the dozenth or so attempt, she wrote one last message: “If you can’t have me, no one will!” and she was found the next morning. Angel wept.

“I told you,” said Dana to her child, “No good could come of her seeing you.”

“But she told me I was beautiful,” Angel sighed.

“I know,” said the Angel’s mother.

When the girl’s computer and internet history was searched, they found the image of Angel Lord in all their glory. Men, women, any one of any persuasion or taste, became captivated at the sight. “We have to leave,” said Dana.

Angel Lord tried to cut themself—“I don’t want to be beautiful!”—But the blade wouldn’t pierce and where it finally did, the scars only leant more character. They tried cutting other places—perhaps if they joined the girl who’d loved them—but something stopped them every time.

“I’m going to stop wearing the Veil,” Angel Lord told their mother when they were twenty-three. “I don’t care what happens to me, I don’t care what happens to the world, I need to be myself and I need the world to see me.”

They plunked themself down on a park bench and waited.

A young man walked by and smiled and they were suspicious, but he say and they spoke and they told their story.

“Well, you are very beautiful,” said the man, “But does that mean you caused these terrible things? Terrible things have happened to you, but that doesn’t make them your fault.”

“You don’t want to… do things… to me?”

“I don’t want to do anything to you,” the young man said, “that you don’t want me to do.”

Dana objected to the marriage when the proposal came several months later, but Angel Lord had let their mother’s paranoia and possessiveness rule their life for quite long enough.

Katelyn Nichols’ blind date was not going well at all. Colin West seemed like a nice guy, I guess, a sweet guy with sweet inhibitions and sweet stories about living with his grandmother until she passed. But there was nothing there—so much nothing in fact, so much sweetness, that she was kind of afraid to ditch him, for fear he might just wilt and crumble into a puddle of wimp, and she didn’t want to see that.

Across the bar, though, she saw Raphael Mann. She didn’t know that was his name, but given enough incentive and cause, she probably could have come up with it. He was so swarthy and windblown and chiseled he could easily have been the model on a cheesy Romance cover. She found her eyes drifting off in his direction periodically over the course of Colin’s accounting-driven conversation style.

“Excuse me,” she found herself saying, “I’m gonna have to go powder my nose.”

She never got to the powder-room, though. Instead, she found herself drawn off in the direction she had seen Mr. Chiselchest wander a few minutes ago. This turn led her out onto a dark alley.

Shit. Why was she here?

“You are not lost,” a nonspecific European accent drawled behind her. “I knew you would come.”

Suddenly, she felt him behind her, hot breath on her neck, hands at her hips, fingers pressing past her skin—this was it. This was what she meant when she said she needed to get back out there!

“You wish me to stop?” he whispered, his words landing on her ears like silk, like smooth jazz.

“No,” she breathed, rolling her head back onto his shoulder.

“Good,” he said.

And then Katelyn felt pressure on her neck. A familiar pressure, at first, that reminded her of early boyfriends’ hickies and college roommates’ forays into kink, but then it didn’t stop there and suddenly there were needles like tines on a barbecue fork treating her neck like an eager virgin girl—

This wasn’t what she signed up for. But then, what else should she have expected from a late-night encounter in a dark alley behind a bar?

She grabbed the back of his head, his hair, trying to pry him off, but that only drove his daggers deeper.

“Stop!” she finally managed to whisper, and as soon as the word was out, she stopped feeling him. It was as though every part of his body stopped touching hers at the same time.

“I apologize,” he sulked. She turned around to him and at first, he wouldn’t even meet her eyes. “I saw you inside and I thought this was what you wanted. If I misestimated and got carried away…” Finally, his eyes met hers. “I am sorry.”

Then he vanished back into the building like smoke blending into the clouds.

Katelyn wasn’t sure about following her attacker back into the bar, but it was either that or brave the alley. And besides, she thought, I have a boring-but-safe date still waiting for me there. 

“Are you all right?” Colin voiced his concern, but she brushed him off. He paid while she anxiously darted her eyes around the room for the Vampire.

Vampire. Was that what she was calling him? Seemed fair enough.

“Could you walk me home?” she asked him, but then discovered his place was closer. “Could I bother you for a night-cap?” she blushed when he didn’t seem to be going in for a kiss.

What was she doing? She’d only just been assaulted—hadn’t she?—in the back alley of a bar, and now she was—what?

Reclaiming her agency, she told herself. That Vampire had taken liberties she hadn’t granted him, so now here she was mending her pride by taking charge with a guy who definitely wasn’t going to do it himself.

“Sorry I don’t have any wine,” said Colin, bringing her water.

“That’s okay.” She brushed his hand more than she had to, taking the glass from him, and found and held his gaze. This elicited an awkward chuckle.

“I like water more anyway,” he told her. “It’s good for the soul, you know?”

“Yeah,” she breathed, inching closer to him.

“It’s cleansing,” he told her, his voice shaking—no doubt from proximity to her. “And you want to be clean, don’t you?”

This seemed like an odd thing to say, making her frown, but it wasn’t as odd as seeing him whip out a knife and stab her with it.

She had just enough time to scream before it pierced her belly.

I knew it! some part of her brain belted. I knew he was too fucking nice to be true!

She slashed at his face with one set of manicured nails and then caught his head in the other hand and sank both her thumbs into his eyes. Now he was the one screaming.

She slid off the couch, trying to gauge her next move, but then there was a knock at the door.

“Are you all right?” came a familiar European accent.

“Who the fuck are you?” Katelyn screamed.

“Is he dead?” the Vampire asked, sounding relieved.

Just then, Colin answered by blindly shrieking and launching himself in her general direction. Without thinking, Katelyn pulled the knife out of her gut and plunged it deep into his chest. Shit, she thought, realizing too late that removing the knife had been a bad idea. She could feel herself bleeding out.

“Is he dead?” Raphael Mann yelled through the door again.

“Yes,” Katelyn whispered.

In the blink of an eye, the room was filled with shards of the door and her previous attacker was cradling her head in his lap.

“My darling,” he coo’d, “I am sorry, but I must bite you now.”

“Will I become one of you?” she found herself asking.

“If that is what you want,” he said. “Something terrible has happened to you. Now, the choice is yours. Your life can be over now, or you can become a monster. Or, if you are brave and dedicated, you can recover. You can never be who you once were, but perhaps… perhaps you can be better.”

Patricia de Lyon had always wanted a cat, but her parents wouldn’t let her because her father was “allergic”. Supposedly. She didn’t believe that for a minute, though; her parents were just lazy and didn’t want the burden of the feeding and the cleaning—yet for all Patricia’s imprecations and assurances that she would take care of all that, she could not seduce them.

“A girl your age doesn’t need pets,” her mother lectured, “you need friends! Real friends!”

This was hardly fair, Patricia thought. She had friends: kids at school she smiled at and talked to and had lunch with, now and then.

“Who knows?” her mother added, “Maybe even a boyfriend?”

This did bother Patricia, actually. A boyfriend, she would have liked very much. But what were her options? At her school? Scant. Everybody did drugs. Everybody smoked like a chimney. She didn’t want to kiss that. Not that anyone really liked her much, anyway, partly because she didn’t smoke. But she did want… something. So instead, she spent most of her nights quietly up in her room reading fantasies about handsome princelings taking hapless young girls along on adventures.

One day, though, while she was walking home from the bus stop, a black kitten tumbled out of the bushes in front of her, landing in her way. She knew the old superstition, of course, about black cats crossing your path, but assumed that was just because it can be especially hard to see them in the dark, and it was light out, so… And besides, she soon noticed a small brown patch on her belly, so she wasn’t completely black.

The little black cat looked up at her like she really, honestly didn’t know who it was who had eat the canary, and then she let out the tiniest, solemnest little squeak of a miauw.

Patricia didn’t hesitate. I shall name her Eleven, she decided, because she is not quite as black as midnight. She was taking for granted that her parents would not begrudge her a pet found on the street and taken in.

“Absolutely not,” her mother disappointed her. “What did I say? Your father is allergic! We will not have it in this house!”

“But mama—“

“Patricia! Not another word! Now put it back outside before it gets in its animal head we have food around here.”

Reluctantly, Patricia put the little kitten outside in the yard to fend for herself. There are outdoor cats, too, she consoled herself.

But it was no good.

That night, while she lay reading, there was a scratching at her window and an ever-so-soft miauw from outside.

Eleven! thought Patricia. She let the kitten in and kissed and cuddled her to within an inch of her life. When she made another soft miauw, she shushed her hastily before quietly stealing downstairs for some morsels of leftover chicken.

“Miauw,” Eleven kept telling her over the course of weeks and months, growing every day that Patricia kept her hidden, letting her live outside and only bringing her in for cuddles and absconded food.

Except “she” wasn’t the right word, as Patricia discovered one day while rubbing the tomcat’s belly low enough to be sure. She’d never felt one before and always assumed that her first time touching one would be human, but what was wrong with this? She danced back when she felt it, but saw the look in Eleven’s eyes turn from her initial shock to a smoky-eyed smoldering.

Eleven was everything to her. Which was why it was so devastating, six months later, when her mother found out.

“What did I tell you?” her mother shouted, angrier than Patricia had seen her since she’d gone to the deep end of the swimming pool at age six and almost drowned. “No wonder you’ve been so sick!”

This took Patricia by surprise. She hadn’t been sick! Well, she had, of course, she’d had the sniffles, but that wasn’t Eleven’s fault!

“Your father is allergic,” her mother spelled it out or her, “And it’s looking like you are, too!”

The battle for her right to nurture at the expense of her own health was a foregone conclusion, but she fought it still, all the way to the shelter, and then refusing to speak to her mother all the way back home, where she cried herself to sleep.

That night, though, she once more heard the familiar “Miauw?”

Eleven! she shouted inside, and nothing else mattered again, not the allergic reaction she was going to have, not her lack of social life, not the financial burden, not the reaction her father—Hatsjoe!—would continue to have with the cat being around the house, and not her parents’ opinions. Let her peers have their drugs and her parents their health, all Patricia ever needed was this black cat who loved her.

I had a dream that I died.

I think it was a car-crash or something. I remember glass breaking, looking out a broken window at a fire raging near the gas-tank. I remember hearing a sound so loud I couldn’t hear it at all, a light so bright I didn’t even have to walk down the tunnel.

But that was not the worst dream I ever had.

The worst dream I ever had came about two weeks later. I was talking to someone (in the dream) one of my writing gurus, the man who had written one of my favorite films of all time, whom I had met a few months earlier at a screenwriting conference.

I was telling the man a story about battles in space, a sci-fi arc I’d been working on, and he kept telling me to raise the stakes. So I imagined Nicholas Scatterhull escaping on his ship from a planet crumbling through seismic instability–the end of the world.

No. Not a dying planet. A dying star, gasping its last and taking the entire system down with it.

Perhaps not a single star, but a cluster in the galaxy’s center, like in Larry Niven, all supernova’d at once, and wiping out the galaxy.

I was talking to my guru about this when suddenly–that white light again, the end of the tunnel, swallowing me up, and my dying thought realizing that this time, it wasn’t just me. The light itself was dying. And it was taking everything with it.

Voyager hasn’t even left our solar system yet. We are alone in the dark, and know of no one who can help us. No one who might even know about us. This means that, in any given situation, no matter how dire, the single worst thing that can ever happen, the worst case scenario, is the destruction of our sun.

It would take just over eight minutes to reach us, and assuming the blast comes at the speed of light, we will never know.

It would destroy not only every human life, but every human endeavor. Every memory, every monument, every accomplishment put forth by every single living being in the history of the planet, would be extinguished.

I wrote this at a time before we knew (for sure) that the Mayan Apocalypse wasn’t going to destroy the world on December 21st, 2012. If you are reading this, the world has not ended yet, even now.

If you are reading this, the sun still shines, no brighter than it did the day before.

The waves still crash against the rocks, clawing at the moon.

People die, but are also born.

People fight, but make love as well.

And their endeavors are remembered. They are meaningful.

If you are reading this, there is still hope.

If the sun has not exploded, whatever is bothering you, whatever has made you upset, is not the worst thing that could have happened.

It is not the end of the world.

You can be sad. I will understand, and not hold it against you. But it is still possible to be happy.

Once upon a time, there was a little Lamb who liked to play by herself, away from the flock. The Sheep who were her parents—and especially the Ram who was her father—kept warning her about Wolves, but she never listened.

One day, while she was hopping around near the forest, a Wolf did come out to her. “Hey, there, little Lamb,” said the Wolf. “You want someone to play with?”

But the Lamb was too clever for him. “I don’t need anyone to play with!” she said, “and least of all you, because you’re a Wolf!” And she boo’d and baa’d and stuck her tongue out, then hopped and skipped away, leaving the Wolf in the dust. “Well, now that was pretty rude,” said the Wolf, and no sooner had he said so than he heard someone laughing behind him. Upon closer investigation, it turned out to be an Older Wolf.

“Boy, you really are something,” said the Older Wolf. “expecting some lamb to fall for that old trick when she’s obviously smarter than you.”

“But I’m a Wolf!” said the younger one. “Wolves have to eat, don’t they?”

“Times change,” the Older Wolf explained. “You can’t pull that kind of wool over little lambs’ eyes anymore. You need something a little bit thicker.” And with that, he produced a cloak made out of sheeps’ woll and handed it over to the younger Wolf. “Nowadays,” said the older one, “to catch a decent Lamb, you gotta be a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.”

Meanwhile, the little Lamb ran home and found her father. When she finally saw him, she cried out “Daddy! Daddy! I saw him! I saw a wolf!”

“You saw a wolf?” said her father. “Well, what did he do?”

“He asked me to come and play with him,” said the Lamb. “But I said no and I ran the other way.”

“Good for you,” said her father. “That’s exactly how we act around wolves!”

But the Wolf had this new plan to work on, now, so he put on his Sheep’s Clothing and hovered at the edge of the woods.

“No, no, no,” said the Older Wolf. “You’re a sheep now! Go into the flock with the other sheep!”

So the bumbling Wolf in the wool stumbled over to the flock of Sheep, who baa’d and bleated at him in greeting. His mouth was watering, but he didn’t do anything because he remembered exactly what the Older Wolf had told him: “This time, you’re only out there to watch them,” he’d said. “Just learn what they’re all about. Trust me, it’ll help you in the long run.”

While he was out there, he saw the little Lamb he had met earlier and she didn’t recognize him. “Hello, sir,” she said. “My, my, what an awful lot of wool you have!”

The better to reel you in and eat you, thought the Wolf, but he didn’t say it because he knew that would blow his cover. “Thanks,” he said instead, then trying not to show how angry he was at the little Lamb for how she’d treated him before, he returned, “that’s not a bad coat yourself.”

“Thanks,” said the little Lamb, beaming that this cute, only slightly older sheep had actually given her a compliment.

But she was distracted by an all-too-familiar voice. “That’s my father calling,” she said. “I’d better go. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

I’m not a stranger, the sinister Wolf thought as she left. You’ve met me before. Or rather, I’ve met you…

So the Lamb’s father called her away, saying he had a Nice Young Ram to introduce her to, saying he was the Cleverest Nice Young Sheep in the whole flock, but the little Lamb thought only of the Mysterious Sheep with the thick wool coat that reminded her so much of her grandfather’s.

That night, the little Lamb continued to think about the Mysterious older Sheep she’d met, about how big and dark and handsome he had seemed, and all the old adventurousness she’d lost when she’d met that Wolf, came tumbling back.

Meanwhile, the Wolf went back to the forest after his excursion to brag to the Older Wolf. “That—went—splendidly!” said the Wolf in Sheeps’ Clothing.

“Tell me about it,” the Older Wolf invited.

“Oh, I met that damn Lamb again,” moaned the Wolf. “The one who spurned me! I gave her a piece of my mind and I’ll give her the rest of my belly, come morning.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” said the Older Wolf. “Have you no sense of style or art? The fun of it is in the hunt, man, not the kill!”

The Wolf wasn’t quite sure how to take that. But he thought about it and decided that maybe he should relish how this impudent Lamb who had once been so cruel to him was now fawning over him in his disguise as a sheep.

So, the next morning, he returned and found the Lamb again in her flock and they spoke and he listened and laughed at her jokes until it was time for her to go. And when she went, she was glowing at this Ram who liked her and he was gloating that the Lamb didn’t know.

And this went on, day after day after day, over and over they would talk until one day, the Wolf’s belly started to rumble and he realized how long it had been since he’d had a decent meal. Perhaps it was time, he thought.

So he lured the little Lamb away. “I want to go on an adventure,” he said. “I want to leave the flock and march right up to the edge of the woods, where no one will see us.”

“And what would we do there?” asked the little Lamb.

“Well,” said the Wolf, “I’ve heard they have the crispest, greenest you have ever tasted, right at the edge of the woods!”

“They do! They do!” cried the little Lamb. “I’ve even tasted it myself! You’re right, we should totally go! We should go right now! Wood grass! Yaay!”

And as the Lamb leapt off into the forest, the Wolf found himself sincerely smiling after her.

At the edge of the woods, the Lamb started crunching away happily at the blades of grass that grew there, while behind her the Wolf started licking his teeth.

But that was when the Wolf started to notice that his mouth wasn’t watering any more when he looked at the little Lamb and he realized that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t really want to eat her all that much anymore.

“What’s wrong?” asked the little Lamb. “Why aren’t you eating?”

“I’m not hungry anymore,” the Wolf lied. “Come on, let’s go back to the flock.”

That night, when the Wolf went back to the forest, his mentor was waiting there again. “So,” said the older wolf, “You’re probably thinking right now that your chase is close to over.”

“No,” said the Wolf. “I’ve given up the hunt for little Lambs.”

“Oh,” said the Older Wolf, “don’t tell me you’ve fallen for your prey. I thought you were better than that.”

“I found,” said the Wolf, “when it came to it, that I just couldn’t do it. She meant too much to me for me to settle on dinner. So I let her go.”

“Well, what will you do now, then?”

The Wolf thought for a moment until his growling stomach answered him. “I’ll go into the woods,” he said, “and hunt Rabbits. They’re easy enough to catch.”

And, without another word, the Wolf threw off his sheep’s clothing and dashed off into the forest.

That was when the Cleverest Nice Young Ram took off his Wolf’s Clothing and sighed: “Well, at least he’ll leave us alone now. That’s all I was after.” And he went home to win the heart of a little Lamb.

And they lived happily ever after.